Viscous flow past a porous sphere within a nonconcentric fictitious spherical cell

The quasi steady axisymmetrical flow of an incompressible viscous fluid past an assemblage of porous sphere situated at an arbitrary position within a virtual spherical cell along the line connecting their centers is analyzed using a combined analytical–numerical technique. At the fluid–porous interface, the stress jump boundary condition for the tangential stresses along with continuity of normal stress and velocity components are employed. The Brinkman model governs the flow inside the porous particle and the flow in the fictitious envelope medium is governed by Stokes equations. A general solution is constructed from the superposition of the fundamental solutions in the two spherical coordinate systems based on both the porous particle and virtual spherical cell. Boundary conditions on the particle’s surface and the fictitious spherical envelope for four known cell models are satisfied by a collocation method for truncated series. Numerical solutions for the drag force exerted on the porous sphere in the presence of the cell are obtained for various cases of the effective distance between the center of the porous particle and the fictitious envelope, the volume ratio of the porous particle over the surrounding sphere, the viscosity ratio, the stress jump coefficient, and a coefficient that is proportional to the permeability. Streamlines in and around porous sphere are presented for the unit cell models at different values of relevant physical parameters. In the limits of the motions of the porous particle in the concentric position with the cell surface and near the cell surface with a small curvature, the numerical values of the normalized drag force are in good agreement with the available values in the literature.